There is more than one gender gap when it comes to professional achievement, but even the good news has a flip side: Women hoping to find men of similar educational and professional achievement may find the pickings to be slim.
The gap in wages between men and women is most persistent. American women who work full time continue to earn about 84% of what men working full time earn, according to the federal Department of Labor. While the gap varies by race, the overall gap has been stubbornly consistent for the past 30 years.
Education remains the best path toward improved earnings, and DOL reported earlier this year that “a woman must complete at least one additional educational degree to earn as much as a man with less education. For instance, on average, a woman with an advanced degree earns less than a man with a bachelor’s degree.”
And women have accepted that challenge.
“Were it not for the fact that women attain a greater number of degrees than men, the gender wage gap would be even larger,” Erin George and Gretchen Livingston of the DOL’s Women’s Bureau wrote in March.
Degree attainment, then, is another gender gap, and it keeps getting wider. By the mid-1990s, women nationally had finally achieved parity with men when it came to college degrees. Among Americans between the ages of 25 and 34, 25% of each sex had earned a bachelor’s degree. (Arkansas women achieved degree parity with men at about 20% in 2011.)
Since then, the percentage of young women who have completed a four-year degree has almost doubled — to 47% — while degree completion among young men has grown more slowly, to 37%, according to new research released this month by the Pew Research Center.
College enrollment and attainment of college degrees in Arkansas remain well below the national average. While 61.4% of recent high school graduates nationally begin college, only 42.1% of Arkansans do, according to the Arkansas Department of Education. However, the national trend of more women than men pursuing higher education is true here, too. As of 2023, 27.9% of all Arkansas women over age 25 had college degrees, compared with 24.3% of men, and the gap is larger among younger women. In 2021, the most recent data available, 58% of the students enrolled in full-time degree programs in Arkansas were female, and a similar gap exists among part-time students pursuing degrees.
The Arkansas Division of Higher Education has no marketing campaigns targeted at specific demographics or special populations, spokeswoman Kimberly Mundell said, but there are some efforts by individual colleges and universities.
A third gender gap, in workforce participation, is narrowing. Women traditionally were much less likely than men to hold paid positions — after the end of World War II, only about a third of women between 25 and 54 were in the workforce or seeking work, compared with almost 100% of men in their prime working years.
Today, men are still more likely to be part of the workforce than women, but the gap is only about 12 percentage points — 89% of men compared with 77% of women between 25 and 54. Among younger men and women, however, the gap is narrowing quickly — entirely because more young women are working. As the Wall Street Journal reported in September, labor force participation by women between 25 and 34 has grown by 6 percentage points in the past decade, to 78.5%, while participation by young men has remained unchanged at 89%.
More ominous statistics: 20% of men in the 25-34 age range still live with their parents, compared with 12% of women. And 8.6% of young men ages 16 to 29 are essentially doing nothing. They fall into a category that economists call NEET — not in education, employment or training. The comparable statistic among young women is 7.8%.
